Whitewash

by Alex Kava

  Eric’s boss, Howard, liked to remind people that Pensacola Beach was just a barrier island, possibly formed years ago by hurricanes shifting sand and shorelines around. Howard, the philosopher, would often say, “That which had created the barrier island was continuously threatening to destroy it.”

  Eric hadn’t been around for Hurricanes Ivan or Dennis, but he sat patiently in awe and listened to the stories, feeling a bit like a war correspondent trying to empathize and take it all in, but never really being able to know the fear, the hardship and loss of those who actually experienced them. He’d heard of looting on the beach. And owners not being able to get to their homes for months. He’d also heard about the goodness of neighbors, coming together from everywhere to cut down trees, clear roads, remove piers out of front yards and pull boats from living rooms.

  The true-and-tried locals, who had been on the beach for the long haul, had claimed the storms brought a lot of strange characters onto their barrier island, most of them either cleanup workers or construction crews, but also some real con artists. Little did the locals know Eric probably fit into that last category. Come to think of it, most of the people he’d become friends with since he arrived on Pensacola Beach probably fit into that category.

  Eric watched the sky light up over the bay toward Gulf Breeze. It looked like only the regulars were out on the water, the working stiffs. Howard was expecting some friends from Miami, although the way Howard said it, it didn’t sound as though they were really his friends. Seemed he had no idea how many days it would take them to come up the coast. He’d asked Eric to keep an eye out for their arrival, but when Eric asked what to look for, Howard just shrugged and said, “You’ll definitely know them when you see them.”

  He liked Howard. He hadn’t been prepared to. He really didn’t want to. He was used to having bosses who threw around their authority, who seemed to enjoy telling others what to do. That definitely wasn’t Howard’s style. He still possessed the laid-back attitude of the surfer boy he had been years ago. He seemed content, having made his fortune and now enjoying it in a simple, genuine way that included working when he wanted and closing shop when he felt like it. Eric looked for a temper, figuring every Vietnam vet had to have one brewing somewhere even deep beneath the surface, but he never saw it. Not even close. Sometimes Eric wished Howard would push him around. It’d probably make what he was really doing here a lot easier.

  Eric heard the noise before he realized what it was. The scrape and clop came from around back of Howard’s Deep-Sea Fishing Shop. On the water side was a boardwalk with a half-dozen small bistro tables and chairs that separated Howard’s shop from the boat slips. There was an adjoining oyster bar and around the corner was a set of narrow stairs leading to Eric’s second-floor studio apartment. The only thing next to it was the fenced-off Dumpster area and that’s where the noise was coming from.

  He saw the yellow-gloved fingers hanging over the top of the Dumpster, someone gripping the edge from inside. Now Eric could hear the shoving and flipping of garbage being moved against the metal. The top of a shaved head popped up and just as quickly went back down. Another yellow-rubber-gloved hand came up. The metal screeched a bit from the extra weight climbing up over the side, and Eric could hear the scrape and clop of feet trying to get traction as the hands pulled.

  The young man lifted himself until he could fold over the side, allowing his stomach to hang on as he swung one leg over, straddled the Dumpster edge like a gymnast on the vault. He swung the other leg over and made a professional dismount, unencumbered by the black hip boots. He took his yellow gloves off, pushed his goggles to the top of his head and pulled off the air filter from his nose, letting it hang by its rubber band around his neck. Other than the strange gear and the bright yellow rubber gloves—the kind for dishwashing, not surgery—the man looked like a college kid. He started going through the deep pockets of his cargo pants before he even noticed he wasn’t alone.

  “Oh, hey, Eric.”

  “How’s it going, Russ?”

  “I struck gold.” He smiled at Eric and showed him a wad of what looked like wet and stained unopened envelopes. “Real gold.” He pointed to the streaked preprinted envelope. “Preferred card holder,” he read it to Eric. “You know what this means.”

  And Eric did. He knew it meant there were preprinted bank checks with the credit-card holder’s account numbers all ready and waiting to be filled in and the signature forged. He knew this only because Russ had educated him. The kid made a science out of Dumpster diving. It was supposed to be a hobby.

  Eric knew Russ had served some time for identity theft.

  But nobody ever questioned Russ, at least not among the group that hung out at Bobbye’s Oyster Bar. They were a select group that had gravitated to each other because of their past indiscretions. A little credit-card fraud seemed minor when any one of the others could easily toss up much greater sins. And that included Eric.

  59

  Washington, D.C.

  Jason turned on the TV as he finished dressing. He’d decided to go for a run this morning instead of getting to work early. Usually he ran in the evenings, but lately he’d been staying at the office. He didn’t mind. He liked his job, but his job was consuming his life.

  Jason stopped in the middle of knotting his tie and glanced around the small studio apartment. Who was he kidding? The job had become his life. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d stopped at the Y for a game of pickup basketball. He quit going out with coworkers for drinks or pizza when he became chief of staff. Even his buddies from his messenger days had written him off as soon as he moved up to the big office with a secretary and an expense account. No, that wasn’t right. It was Jason who had put the chill on them, only because that’s what was expected.

  He flipped TV channels, looking for anything more on Zach’s murder. He left it on ABC and Good Morning America while he checked the newspapers. Earlier when he was getting back from his run he’d bought copies of the Post and the Times. He sipped orange juice straight from the gallon container and searched headlines. How could a member of a congressman’s staff be murdered in a D.C. hotel room and not make the front page? Maybe it wasn’t a big deal. Or maybe someone was working to keep it out of the headlines.

  He wondered what, if anything, Lindy had told Senator Malone about being at the hotel, about being with him. It didn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter. Christ! He just realized it did matter what Senator Malone thought of him.

  He emptied the orange-juice container in two final gulps and tossed it in the trash can under the sink. That’s when a voice on television stopped him dead in his tracks.

  He made his way to the TV, grabbing the remote and punching up the volume. The whole time he looked for signs that it could be film clips from something previously recorded. But no, it was live, today, happening right now. On Good Morning America via a live satellite feed, Robin Roberts was interviewing William Sidel.

  60

  Pensacola Beach, Florida

  Sabrina didn’t think sleep was possible. She had had problems ever since she moved to Florida. When sleep came it came in restless fits, an hour or two of dreams. And even her dreams exhausted her. In them, she constantly packed for trips she hadn’t planned or she kept getting dressed for an appointment she was already late for.

  Sometimes her mother came to her, inviting Sabrina into a house Sabrina didn’t recognize. Her mother stood in the doorway, waving to her, smiling, but when she turned, Sabrina could see the side of her face still mangled from the car accident. It woke her every time, sometimes with a gasp, sometimes with tears. The tears always surprised her because she hadn’t cried about her mother while awake. She hadn’t allowed herself.

  This sleep was different. Light, almost weightless, she floated on a breeze of ocean mist. She felt relaxed. She felt safe. She could smell the saltwater with a combination of coffee and bacon. She thought she heard seagulls…and singing. Her eyelids were too heavy to open. She
didn’t want to leave this place. Somewhere on the other side was a man with a baseball bat, his shirtsleeves rolled up, the bat slung over his shoulder ready and waiting. Then suddenly she saw Anna, a white parachute billowing out as she plunged and fell right on top of Dwight Lansik in a tank of chicken guts.

  Sabrina woke with such a jolt she felt the car move. Miss Sadie jumped, too. Even Lizzie gave a hiss. Sabrina woke them all from their respective places inside the Studebaker.

  “Are you all right, dear?” Miss Sadie twisted up and around to get a good look at her, grabbing for her eyeglasses at the same time.

  Sabrina could see several strands of hair had come loose from the old woman’s meticulous bun, and the bags under her eyes were swollen from driving most of the night.

  “Where are we?” Sabrina sat up slowly, taking in the surroundings of the parking lot.

  “Pensacola Beach,” Miss Sadie announced, pointing over the hood of the car at the colorful water tower across the street that looked like a giant green, blue, yellow and orange beach ball in the clear morning sky.

  Beyond the water tower was the beach and water, lots of it, the emerald green waves of the gulf and the sand as white as sugar. Miss Sadie had pulled the Studebaker into a restaurant’s empty parking lot. The sun was coming up in one direction and the moon still hung bright in the opposite sky, almost full. It was that time of day her mother used to call the moonraker hour, when she claimed the muses guided her hands over the clay or directed her paintbrush, depending on what medium she chose. Sabrina’s dad used to laugh and say her mother was the only artist he knew who bothered to get up before noon. But her mother’s obsession or compulsion—because Sabrina was certain her mother’s love of drama would have insisted on calling it one or the other—had rubbed off on her. It was the time of day when Sabrina usually ran because she enjoyed watching the sky go from purple to blue. And it was the one time of morning when she could think without the noise of the day interrupting.

  The restaurant looked closed, but Sabrina could smell fresh coffee and bacon coming from the vents on the side of the building. So she hadn’t been dreaming entirely. The screeching seagulls were real, too.

  The smell of coffee and sweet vinegar filled the car. Stronger now. It definitely wasn’t just the restaurant vents. Sabrina leaned up against the front seat to find Miss Sadie rummaging through the cooler.

  “You must be starving, dear,” she said as she handed Sabrina a wax-papered sandwich that included the sweet pickles Sabrina could smell. She watched the old woman’s arthritic fingers wrap around the stainless-steel thermos and pour a second cup of coffee. Then she took the offerings and sat back, trying to eat slowly when she wanted to gobble. A sandwich had never tasted so good.

  They sat separately, Miss Sadie and Lizzie in front, Sabrina in the back. They ate in silence, watching the first arrivals across the street on the beach.

  “I don’t know if he’s even here,” Sabrina finally said, realizing for the first time that she wanted him to be. “We may have come all this way for nothing.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Miss Sadie said without looking back at her. “I haven’t been to the beach in a very long time.”

  61

  Chattahoochee, Florida

  Leon wasn’t happy about returning to the Florida State Hospital. The place gave him the creeps. Didn’t help matters that he knew Casino Rudy was here somewhere with a bullet lodged in his head, a bullet that so far, almost everyone thought he had put there himself. Last Leon heard, Rudy was conscious but talking out of his head about a janitor named Mick slipping into his Biloxi hotel room and popping him. Sounded like total nonsense to everybody…everybody except Leon. Who knew a plain gray jumpsuit with just the right name badge could save Leon’s ass. At least for the time being. If he could figure out a plan, he’d take care of Casino Rudy while he was here, too. But with the way his luck was going, he knew better than to push things.

  He still couldn’t figure out what went wrong. Maybe the Galloway woman knew she was being set up. But it didn’t make sense to Leon that she’d let her coworker take a fall for her. ’Course, Leon had worked with a few assholes he wouldn’t mind seeing take a death plunge. Still, it nagged at him like a hangnail.

  Whether she knew she was being set up didn’t really matter. What did matter was that she had been there, according to his client, whom Leon had finally given in and talked to an hour ago. She was there someplace, hiding in that shitload of pipes and gears and noise.

  His client told him Sabrina Galloway’s security key card had been used at 4:06 p.m. to get in the same door that he had entered. It was information they had given to the State Patrol in order to put suspicions on her as the murderer. Leon didn’t ask how they managed to explain his key card’s entrance. They didn’t seem concerned about it. The magic of computers, Leon figured. They could hand over whatever they wanted. Maybe they could even make his master key card entrance disappear. He didn’t really care. What he cared about was that if Sabrina Galloway was there at 4:06, then she saw him.

  His client had taken advantage of what he thought was an opportunity to make the best of a mistake. His client probably thought Leon should be grateful, like he was making Leon’s job easier for him.

  “In less than twenty-four hours there’ll be an APB out for her. There won’t be anywhere for her to hide.”

  What could Leon do? He’d screwed up, again. How could he complain about having cops all over the place looking for the same mark he was looking for?

  At one point the client sounded as though he didn’t mind if the State Patrol took her into custody, like that would be enough to solve his problem.

  “Who’s going to believe her?” he’d said. “Her version of the truth will never hold up now that she’s a suspected murderer instead of a victim.”

  Cocky son of a bitch, Leon had thought, but said nothing. He hated this guy’s type. Too much arrogance and too little common sense. Not that he was complaining. He made a decent living because assholes like this guy thought they should be able to control their own world, including all the schmucks that came into that world. The one thing these assholes didn’t respect was that human nature was a fickle thing. It was something that Leon had even forgotten, and now he realized that more than luck, or more than some fortune-teller’s curse, the simple unpredictability of human nature had probably caused his mistakes.

  Take nothing for granted. There is no such thing as a coincidence. Look ahead and expect the unexpected. Figure out what’s predictable, then do the exact opposite. He’d gotten lazy. Maybe even cocky. He needed to remind himself of the basics, follow the rules he had lived by and survived by. And that’s why even though the client sounded content to let the police take care of Sabrina Galloway, Leon could not. His last and most important rule had always been cover your ass, no matter what it takes.

  After all these years his face had never been seen by a mark, or at least, as in Casino Rudy’s case, not by one who had and lived to speak about him. If Sabrina Galloway had seen him, he needed to take care of her before the State Patrol got to her.

  62

  Pensacola Beach, Florida

  On the second drive-by, Sabrina agreed it wouldn’t hurt to check it out. Her father had told her that Eric was living above a boathouse on Pensacola Beach and worked for a man named Howard Johnson. So here was a boathouse, a small business named Howard’s Deep-Sea Fishing. The small shop included Bobbye’s Oyster Bar on the side of the building. Miss Sadie parked the Studebaker in such a way that Sabrina could see small bistro tables on a boardwalk, positioned for a view of the charter boats coming and going from their slips in front of the building. On the other side there was even a set of steps leading to a second-floor apartment with a small deck and an old-fashioned red neon No Vacancy sign above the door.

  Sabrina told herself not to get her hopes up. If Eric was here it would mean her father’s mind was more lucid than she or his doctors believed it could be. She felt the fami
liar knot twist in her stomach and she wished she could call her dad to make sure he was all right. But how could she call to warn him when he probably wouldn’t even recognize her voice?

  Miss Sadie tidied herself up. She stretched her small frame over the steering wheel so she could get a close-up look in the rearview mirror. Sabrina watched the old woman poke and smooth crinkled strands of hair back into her meticulous bun. Before she replaced her glasses Sabrina noticed again the swollen bags under her eyes. She had to be exhausted and yet she was still calm and in charge, taking care of Sabrina as if…as if she were family.

  She hadn’t had anyone like Miss Sadie in a long time. Someone who only wanted what was best for her. Certainly not Daniel. Not even Eric. There hadn’t been anyone since her mom died. Though her mom never really fussed over her, or tried to still take care of her after Sabrina became an adult. In fact, while most women had empty-nest syndrome, Sabrina’s mother embraced her time alone and flourished. Especially when she immersed herself in her “marathons of creation,” as she liked to call them. Between her mother’s commissioned art projects and her father’s mad-scientist inventions, it wasn’t easy to get their attention. Or at least not for Sabrina. She was the independent one whose life was planned and plotted with timers and day planners to keep her on track. Sabrina’s mother used to say her daughter had been twelve one day and thirty-three the next.

  Eric on the other hand lived on the edge—whatever that meant. Sabrina often thought it was simply a way to make being irresponsible and undependable sound romantic. He had a law degree and had been a ski instructor, bartender, road-crew boss, insurance salesman, repo man, short-order cook, security guard and limousine driver, but never a lawyer. And that wasn’t counting the last two years that they’d been out of touch.